SLC Recovery and Support

StreetLife Communities - September 11, 2024

There is an ordinariness to this work after you’ve done it long enough. Ten years. Twenty years. It becomes a life, not an activity. The people with whom we share the way are our community, not the object of some program. Those on this team become as close as family…closer maybe. We are visiting among our friends, no differently than when we visit among parishioners. Home visits. People. Accompaniment.

While it becomes ordinary as the years go by, the holy isn’t lost on us either. The sharing of personal stories is a holy thing. The encounters with something beyond us that are so hard to define. The ground underneath becomes holy, as well.

I’ve seen her at this spot many times, but I hadn’t seen her in a few months. Word was that she’d gotten housing and so had her son who’d been outside too. As she walked towards me I could tell something was wrong.

She never looked up. Her tears dripped onto the ground around her feet as she stood in front of me and struggled to speak. She came to tell me that her son had died in the housing he had gotten. An OD. Another OD.

I gave her a long hug. She sobbed for just a minute and then pulled herself away.

“I’ll be okay,” she said. “I just wanted you to know.” An ordinary encounter. Grief abounds. Death takes everyone. And also a holy encounter, just her and us and a power greater than all of us, the ground soaked with the tears of the brokenhearted. A sacred trust passed between fellow travelers. A keepsake shared and now stored gently is a jar packed full of devastating keepsakes.

As she walked back down the alley into the neighborhood, another woman approached. She is couch surfing with family but the relationship is tenuous and she’s afraid the job she just started isn’t going to earn enough for first and last for her own place before she overstays her welcome and gets put out. One of hundreds of such stories. Ordinary. She didn’t need a lunch. She came for a prayer. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I will be among them,” is promised in the ancient scriptures. As we joined hands, my mind settled on those words, “Among them”. Holy.

Another man, again no longer homeless, came to tell us about some people he was able to help. A year ago, it was not within his street-hardened make-up to help anyone but himself. And when he was out here, he helped himself to a lot of things. He hurt a lot of people.

Over time and many visits, and having gotten inside, he began to change. Nothing big all at once. Lasting change rarely comes that way. Drunk less often. Less drunk when he was drunk. Softer eyes. A healthier color in his face. A kind word here and there. Ordinary, if you didn’t have any context about him.

“I gave them some money to pay their landlord…so he wouldn’t put them out like I been put out, you know. For the first time I can remember, I’m proud of myself.” The joy of helping others. Transformation. Once a taker, pure and simple. Now a giver. The light on his face is holy. The change in him is holy.

Ordinary encounters. But also encounters with the holy. This is our community.

StreetLife Communities- August 17, 2022

I came late to understanding the opioid epidemic. Seems I get there late for a lot of things like this. By “understanding it”, I mean understanding the degree to which it’s penetrated into the fabric of society. And I mean the perniciousness of pills and their resulting next steps: he**in and now fentanyl.

By the time I even understood what I was looking at in the shifting population of homeless people we were serving, the Sackler’s OxyContin monster had been killing people and ruining lives for ten years. 2006 was the first time I really grasped the full power these drugs had and where the addiction started. My epiphany involved a long story about a 14-year-old girl selling her body to pay for her habit. Somebody turned her onto OxyContin when she was 12.

They might be shooting he**in now, but it invariably started with a pill. It took me awhile to figure out what we were looking at. Up until then, I thought he**in was a drug that saw it’s heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s. By 2006, it was everywhere in the part of the city that we were serving then.

I think part of the reason it took me so Iong to get it was that in 2006 the “pill mills” were still running and doctors were still writing scripts for large numbers of pills for everything from tooth aches, to sprained ankles, to arthritic chronic back pain. So it was less visible. The products were known products and the pushers had licenses.

It wasn’t until controls were put in place and over-prescribers were being prosecuted that we really saw street he**in take off as a drug of choice among the population we serve.

Up until about 2017 or 2018, it was possible for us to make a few calls from the street and be able to get people into in-patient treatment with their state insurance. Now, it’s next to impossible to make that happen in the precious half-hour to an hour window of time we get in an encounter on outreach. Willingness is so fleeting for people in their addiction. The resources just aren’t there for people who can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket.

Opioid addiction is a chronic and persistent brain disease that involves relapses and life-long treatment and may involve long-term medically assisted support. Most of the people I know who are struggling with this have a number of inpatient rehab stays under their belt. Relapses are both ugly and lethal. How many times in rehab until one finally sticks? I don’t know. Statistics place the average somewhere between four and seven stays.

Back in 2000 when I started doing outreach specifically to the homeless, the population in the part of the city we served was overwhelmingly alcohol-addicted and/or mentally ill, and chronically homeless having spent many years on the streets. Now? The phenomenon of chronic homelessness has mostly been eradicated in this city thanks to the Housing First approach. Those old-timers have been housed or have died off, or both. Chronic alcoholism is still out there, but it’s mostly been replaced by opioid addiction as the precipitating behavior among those we serve.

What we see now is largely people dealing with opioid addiction. Certainly not all, but definitely many if not most. New faces appear nearly every time we go out. The faces seem to get younger, too. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. But I do know that what our institutions are doing now isn’t working. Ask a mom or dad with a kid out here. When they’re finished answering, give them a hug. They need it.

Hug your kids. Teach them to fear pills no matter who is telling them they’re harmless. Teach them to never take a pill or snort a line; never, not ever. Read “Dopesick” by Beth Macy and/or “Dreamland” by Sam Quinones. Educate yourself and your kids. Get your kids connected to other-oriented community not driven by performance. Clear out your medicine cabinets of old prescriptions. Have compassion for families struggling with loved ones who are addicted. It could so easily be you or your kid.

No easy answers. But we haven’t given up, either. This is our community.

StreetLife Communities - July 27, 2024

As we launched out to begin our routes for the day, we didn’t even get two blocks before we were waived down for assistance. One woman shouted out, “Hey StreetLife, stop!” We pulled over and our women assisted her.

Then two more people who were clearly without shelter came trotting up. “Man I’m so glad to see you,” the man said as they caught their breath and accepted a lunch and something to drink. People don’t think about it, but without shelter where can a person get a simple drink of water?

Before we even left that stop just a block down the road from our launch point, we had served more than 10 people who were newly homeless. As we pulled onto the main thoroughfare, we were waved down several times and each time more and more people approached us, people we’d not seen out here before.

At our first actual planned stop, the team loaded up with lunches to carry back down the path to the encampment in the woods. “Six back there, right?”, one volunteer asked in order to get the lunches ready. “ No, there’s 12 back there now.”

At the next stop, the encampment that used to have 5 people just a month ago now had 11. Each stop we made there were more people. Sometimes one or two more, sometimes the encampment has doubled in size.

At our last stop of the day, as the three us skidded down the steep, dusty slope leading under the overpass, we expected to find familiar faces . Instead, there was a new couple we didnt recognize. “Do you have a tent? We don’t have anything. We’re just sitting in our friend’s tent until he get’s back.”

The camp that did have 3 in it, now had 5. The clouds of dust we kicked up as we had slipped and slid down into the encampment now began to settle over us as we looked at each other unsure whether we had anything left to offer.

By the time we completed our route, we were out of absolutely everything and had served 300 individuals. We literally had nothing left. And as I thought through the faces I saw today, I realized there were 30 or 40 we didn’t see that we usually do. The numbers just keep going up. We are now serving nearly 800 people per week.

“How are we going to feed all of these people if the numbers keep going up?”, one volunteer asked near the end of the day. “Where are we going to get resources for this?” There was a desperation in the question.

“I don’t know,” I replied. As I knocked the dust from my pants, my mind went far away for a moment. “I dont know, but we’ll figure it out. People are generous. There will be enough somehow.” We go by faith - faith in a higher power, and faith in our community.

This is our community. There’s always enough if we share.

StreetLife Communities - July 17, 2024

A violent death in the community affects every person in the community. Everyone knows everyone else on some level in these growing encampments. People try to look out for each other. It’s hard though. Gun violence is quick, brutalizing, and shattering no matter where that violence comes from or for what purpose.

The boy who walked up to the van was probably six years old or so. I offered him a bag lunch and a special treat of fresh blueberries. He smiled at that. Not the full smile of a little guy, though.

“How’re you doing, big man?”, I asked.

He smiled another kind of flat smile, but his eyes were far away. I know the look. I wish I didn’t. “A man got killed over there. There’s still blood on the street.”

There’s much a child is unprotected from when they’re homeless and living in a tent. “Unsheltered” takes on a whole new meaning out here. He will forever have the shouts and the cacophonous gunfire etched into parts of his being that are hard to access but that will send him messages that will negatively affect him for the rest of his life.

His older brother came up to get a lunch and treat, too. His father kept them close. There’s only so much a father can do to protect his kids out here. He might be able to protect them physically. But it’s nearly impossible to protect them mentally and spiritually when the bottom falls out and you end up on the street.

I think of the words of my Teacher, “Send the children unto me”, and “You must be like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” And I sometimes wonder, “When we send them to you, Lord, can you fix them? Can you fix this? Can you fix us?” I sure hope so.

Sometimes it feels as if, as a society, we’ve decided we’re okay with people going without shelter, without mental health support, without food and decent hygiene. You know, as long as it’s someone else…someone else’s kid. It’s as if the idea of ticketing the homeless and locking them up if they can’t pay is the best we can do as a society. I just don’t have words for this anymore. The ripples just keep spreading farther and farther out.

This is our community. The damage is so deep.